Microsoft has been releasing free add-ons for Dynamics CRM called Accelerators. The Accelerators enable you to quickly add new functionality to Dynamics CRM to handle common business activities. As you might expect, the Event Management Accelerator enables you to manage events right within Dynamics CRM.

This serves as a good example of what’s possible with Dynamics CRM. Many companies still think of CRM as contact management for storing customer names, phone numbers, and history. While it can be used for that there is so much more potential for it to be used as a business efficiency platform.

Microsoft has been pushing the idea of XRM which is “Anything Relationship Management”. Where CRM emphasized customers, XRM could be partners, distributors, physicians, and you name it. For XRM you still use Dynamics CRM. You just use it to do a lot more.

So back to Event Management. Coordinating events can be a costly and time consuming process. Because CRM doesn’t have event management built-in users partially use CRM along with other tools to manage the entire process . Wouldn’t it be nice to have a single fully integrated method of managing everything? This is exactly what the Event Management Accelerator enables you to do in Dynamics CRM.

The Accelerator provides a web-based process for enabling interested attendees to view information about the event and register for it online on a webpage that Dynamics CRM automatically creates. All of their registration data is captured and stored in CRM. So here’s a high level look at the process.

The Accelerator adds new functionality to the marketing campaign entity. You can create an event much in the same way you do a marketing campaign by adding planning tasks and activities. You can configure quite a bit including the date/time, duration, location, maximum capacity, and even sponsors.

Here’s the campaign event form to create an event in Dynamics CRM.

After you’re done setting up the event, CRM creates a campaign that you can use to contact target attendees. As an example you could do a mail merge and send a mass email invitation and registration link to all attendees. When they click on the link they will be taken to an events calendar page.  This webpage can be integrated with your website or be used independently. If there is more than one event they will be displayed on this page.

When they click “Register Now” on the Events Calendar page they are taken to the registration webpage form.  Once completed this registration data is transferred directly into Dynamics CRM.

After completing the form they are taken to a confirmation webpage that lets them know they’ll receive a confirmation email.

The registrant’s information is then added to the event campaign as a campaign response. When you open up the campaign response it displays a form with all of their details.

Overall, this is a pretty slick little add-on that should help your business manage events more efficiently. And since the people you’re inviting are probably existing or potential customers this accelerator will be another tool to make sure they have a good experience every time they deal with your company and its employees.